A group of Kremlin and security officials is driving the offensive against internet freedoms. The government fears the web could be used to mobilise protesters and disseminate dangerous ideas and information and it is looking for ways to switch off connections in times of crisis.

[…] What the Russians want most from China is technology. Russia has no means of handling the vast amounts of data required by Yarovaya’s law, and it cannot rely on western technologies because of sanctions.

The Chinese officials also ensured senior Huawei staff were present at key information security conferences in Russia, and the company was the major sponsor of the Russian information security forum held in Beijing in October. […] [Source]

Whether such moves represent politically motivated censorship or a broader attempt to bring foreign Internet firms in line with Russia’s sense of “digital sovereignty” is unclear. And in some ways, it doesn’t matter—they’re two sides of the same coin. Putin and his lieutenants are clearly trying to exercise more control over the digital lives of Russian citizens. Something that, interestingly enough, there is broad public support for in the country. [Source]

Powerful undemocratic states like China and Russia have for a while now put the internet to use to mislead the public, create the illusion of mass support, and either render opposition invisible or expose it to targeting. The paid bureaucrats in the Communist Party’s “50-cent army” flood debates on Chinese social media and message boards with nationalist propaganda. Russia’s armies of trolls smear critics, spread propaganda, and sow paranoia — both nationally and abroad, as when a cache of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee drowned real news in innuendo and conspiracy.

[…] Silicon Valley is, slowly, coming to terms with the way its products have enabled the revival of illiberal populism around the world. Only a week after the election, Twitter finally introduced some simple anti-harassment tools that its users had been requesting for years. It’s not encouraging, by any means, that we’re reduced to begging powerful CEOs to institute changes to their popular products for the sake of democracy. At Facebook, frustrated employees formed a secret working group aimed at dealing with “fake news”; eventually, Zuckerberg declared that the company would take several concrete steps to address it. A week later, the New York Times reported that the company had been working on a censorship tool in an effort to reenter the Chinese market. [Source]